


If I Close My Eyes Forever

by Andrettianna



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Don't look at me like that, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Unfinished, i dont know where this is going, unedited
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-02 23:11:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21169448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andrettianna/pseuds/Andrettianna
Summary: WIP. Recovery fic. You've read it all before and you and I both know you want more.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> first 500 or so words here are meant to be a sort of prologue. Next update is going to be Buck returning to the bank and my very first attempt at something I'm picturing in my mind as a complete gore-fest. I'm talking, Let The Bodies Hit the Floor, Drowning Pool's gonna be so proud, but probably not my mom. 
> 
> :)

The target dropped his shield and stared at him, pleadingly, searching his face for something that wasn’t there. “I’m not going to fight ‘ya. You’re my friend.”

No. An Asset doesn’t have friends, an Asset has missions. He hates when they beg, at the end, when they know they’re about to die. Begging is useless. In his own experience, it’s never stopped what was coming. If anything it just draws out the inevitable. And for whatever reason he doesn’t want to hurt this man. Some nagging ghost at the back of his head full of goo is screaming at him to stop. But this man is his mission, and he never fails to complete a mission. Confusion and rage pour through him like acid, constricting his chest and throat, tunneling his vision. He screams inhumanly as he launches himself at the target, who isn’t even pretending to fight back anymore. _No friends, no attachments_, his programming supplies in response to his confusion. 

“You’re my mission!” His rage bellows as he strikes the target over and over with his metal fist. Trying to crush the familiar face, wipe out the fear and the desperation that’s been crowding his brain since they first sent him after this target.

He knows this man. In another life maybe. Before he became the thing that he is now. He knows that he knows this man. It’s not the first time HYDRA has sent him to eliminate someone from his past life. He knows the best he can hope for is to end it quickly and get back to base, to the Chair, where they’ll erase him again and put him to sleep in the blissful nothingness of the stasis tank. He pulls his metal fist back once more, but the target takes the reprieve to try and speak to him again. His voice is hoarse, cracked with pain.

“Then finish it. Because I’m with ‘ya ‘til the end of the line.” 

That phrase is like an alarm klaxon going off inside his head. He freezes, thinking it’s a trigger phrase. He’s paralyzed by the flood of memories it invoked. He feels like he’s dying all over again. 

He can see a skinny little slip of a punk wearing his target’s face, still beat to hell, red and swollen shut left eye, a split lip and bloodied nose… saying the exact same words to him.

And then he sees him again, younger this time, eyes rimmed red with unshed tears, wearing an old suit that swamps him… and the words are coming out of his own mouth this time.

And now the target, Steve –I’m Your Friend- Rogers, is helping him limp along in a rank and file of soldiers. He’s big now. (_I thought you were smaller.// I joined the army_.) And he’s fussing over him like a goddammed mother hen, “What happened to you in there, Buck? Are you ok? You know you can tell me anything. I’m with ‘ya til the end of the line.” 

And then the floor is shattering just like his whole fucking world and the target- no, _Steve_, is slipping away, falling right out from underneath him. He has enough presence of mind to grab a girder before the floor crumbles away entirely. And it’s sickeningly familiar sense of déjà vu, watching that face get farther and farther the further he falls. There’s no thought in letting go and following after him into the river. He’ll always follow Steve. Til the end of the line. 


	2. Chapter 1

Pulling Steve –I’m Your Friend- Rogers from the river goes against mission. But letting him drown goes against something wired even deeper than that. Project Insight is lying at the bottom of the Potomac, and it’ll be hours, possibly even days, before clean up crews can assess the true depths of his failure. He briefly considers running, and instantly knows he’s gone AWOL in the past, because thinking about it now brings a wave of terror and nausea and pain that he knows to associate with a full wipe. AWOL is not an option. He needs repairs. He’s been out of stasis too long already. The shakes are just now starting a slow shiver in his shoulder, the flesh and blood one is still dislocated and metal arm is shooting lances of fire into his spine and along his brain stem. If he doesn’t return to base soon the fever will start and he’ll start hallucinating. That’s what happened in Cairo in ’52. And again in Vietnam, but he doesn’t remember which time he was there. 

The thought of leaving Steve, bloody and broken, on the river bank feels repulsive, but he can’t bring him back to the vault and he can’t stay with him here. HYDRA would surely wipe him and then he’ll // your name is James Buchanan Barnes// never find out anything more about the trigger phrase that pulled up so many memories out of his shit-for-brains head. He’s so confused. He knows, knows, the first thing they’ll do is wipe the Asset. But as long as Steve is alive then maybe next time… he doesn’t let himself finish that train of thought. Maybe next time, maybe next time, maybe next time, he knows next time he won’t remember any more than he remembers right now. He doesn’t want to return to base, but his body begins to move towards the extraction point anyway. 

His handler isn’t waiting at the extraction point. There’s just one lone member of the STRIKE team that he started out the week with. It’s Rollins, one of the most senior members of his team. He can remember teaching Rollins how to calculate trajectories when he was younger. He started the week with a ten man unit when they woke him up for the hit on Director Fury, level 7 target. The rest of the STRIKE team must be either dead or running for their safe houses. He thinks if they don’t return to base for debrief in the next 12 hours he’ll be sent out to eliminate them. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t make attachments, but he still feels protective of his squad. He’s just so fucking tired of watching men die. 

“Where’s Rumlow?” He asks Rollins. He gets a glare and a terse, “He was in the Triskelion when it was hit. Along with Pierce. And the rest of the unit.”

He feels his brow furrow at that. It feels like Rollins is placing the blame on him. His mission wasn’t to protect Pierce, it was to eliminate Captain Rogers, and surely they can’t already know that he’s not at the bottom of the Potomac. He hesitates, watching Rollins’s face in his periphery, waiting for a clue that he’s about to be labeled a traitor to HYDRA. But Rollins just slumps his shoulders and pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. Lighting one, he hands it over and lights another for himself. The Asset isn’t technically allowed these little indulgences, but his team usually finds a way to sneak him one when their out in the field. He accepts the smoke with his metal hand so Rollins won’t see the tremor starting in his right hand. 

He remembers a mission in Iraq. Early ‘00’s. He had successfully eliminated his target, another corrupt politician, and before he had returned to his extraction point he had taken a pack of smokes from the bedside stand and lit up on his walk back to his team. His handler at the time had questioned him about the cigarette smell on his clothes on their way back to the base. He had shrugged nonchalantly and felt his eyes brighten with his defiance of the nonessential consumables rule. His handler had eyed him critically but said nothing. Pierce had been sending him out more and more frequently and being awake for so long was wearing on his programming, making him take more risks than necessary. Anything to feel alive and human, even if it meant facing punishment for disobedience. 

Nothing was ever said about the cigarette, but the next mission, and nearly every subsequent mission with that handler had ended with a contraband Camel. He had asked once, halfway thru a smoke, why he was being given this. The handler had just smiled and said something about carrots and sticks. He remembers now that Rollins had started on that squad. He had performed well, quickly making a name for himself as a sharpshooter. But Rumlow had caught the attention of the higher ups for his ruthlessness. He was vicious and his methods were bloodier than most. There was no surprise when he got promoted to handler. There were no more cigarettes after that. Disobedience, no matter how small the infraction, was punished with the same bloody ruthlessness that he showed in the field. Rumlow will not be missed by the Asset. Some handlers treated him like a machine, some like a well trained attack dog, but Rumlow had treated him the same as was he treated when he was in the Russian prison before HYDRA saved him. Punishing him just to see him break. 

He wonders if Steve ever punished him like that, just to see how many kicks it takes to get to the center of his gelatinized brain. There must be a reason why he can’t remember Steve. He had a trigger phrase, and only handlers have those, so maybe he was handler and he defected? If he was a traitor then it makes sense that they would have wiped everything about him out of his head. It makes sense, but it doesn’t feel right. 

Rollins stomps out his cigarette and the Asset does the same. He’s glad Rollins had remembered this small kindness from before Rumlow. It feels like circling back. 

“I don’t know what’s going to happen now,” Rollins tells him. “This was a huge, extremely public, fuck up and there’s going to have to be people held accountable for how this went down.”

The Asset keeps his face neutral, unconcerned. “Cut off one head, another will grow in its place,” he tells Rollins. “You think this is the first cell I’ve seen go down in flames?” 

His words are nonchalant, but inside his mind is reeling. Pierce and Rumlow are both down. He wonders how bad his punishment will be. He wonders how long until he can get back to the stasis tank. He doesn’t look at Rollins as he climbs into the back of the armored black SUV. He’s being watched in the review mirror. He can feel the questions in the stare, but the Asset knows not to talk to any unauthorized personnel and Rollins doesn’t have the clearance to issue the trigger for a mission report. So they drive in silence back to the vault. He rolls his flesh and blood arm onto the back of the seat and when they’re stopped at a light near the edge of the city he rotates it in the correct, precise way to realign the joint. The snap is loud in the otherwise quiet of the SUV. Rolins winces. The Asset does not. 

By the time they’re pulling into the secure underground parking behind the old bank he can no longer suppress the full body tremors that are pulling at his metal arm and turning his stomach to acid. There’s a full squadron of guards waiting to escort the Asset to the vault when he exits the vehicle. He pulls his spine at straight as he can manage and tries not to show any weakness. 

“Take him to medical,” Rollins orders.

One of the escort guards stiffens. “Sir, that’s not standard op,” he hedges, looking shiftily between the STRIKE member and the Asset. The Asset braces against the SUV as another tremor rips along his spine. He thought he had kept his physical state in check, but Rollins has seen through him. His vision tunnels into a single point on the dirty concrete floor of the garage. His hearing seems off too, but he can’t take his eyes off that oil spot. 

“Clearly, we’ve moved beyond standard operations at this point.” Rollins’s voice sounds like it’s underwater. His head feels like it’s underwater. Actually, he might still be in the Potomac. He realizes there’s a very good chance this is all a hallucination. After all, how fucking likely is it that both his handler and his programmer are both terminated. That hasn’t happened since Lukin, he thinks. He risks a glance around him and tries to decide if he’s really here or dying of asphyxiation at the bottom of a river right now. 

The voices swim back into his hearing. A murmur of agreement and, “…right about the priority right now being to get this back into storage and wait for orders. Jesus Christ the fall out on this is going to be astronomical.” He feels someone stripping him out of his tac vest and holsters. A different voice, “About the only positive thing we’ve got going for us right now is this thing showed up for the rendezvous.” Someone slaps his flesh and blood shoulder sending a shock of pain radiating through his chest. “Good little Soldier always does what it’s told, right?” That’s rhetorical. He knows he’s not supposed to answer, so he keeps his mouth shut and his eyes focused straight on the oil spot. If heing going to be punished, he doesn’t think they’ll beat him here in the garage, but he’s been wrong about such things plenty of times before. 

There’s more talking, but it sounds garbled. Distant. Under water. He’s tense, half expecting one of the guards to lay into him with their stun baton. They’ve got him down to his under shirt and tac pants. No weapons. Doesn’t remember when they took his boots. The oil spot is gone. He’s sitting in a chair in the medical suite. Shit. He’s losing time. 

A tech is attaching an IV into his arm. They’re still talking. The doctor is cussing up a storm. Ranting to Rollins who’s leaning against the medroom wall with his arms crossed casually over his chest watching the techs mill about. 

“Pierce was a fucking idiot. I told him over and over, this is a highly specialized tool, and he went around swinging it like a God damned hammer! I, for one, am not fucking surprised this happened.” 

He pulls a feeding tube out of a drawer and rips it out of its sanitized package and affixes it to the bag on the IV stand. 

“Open your mouth.” He demands, impatiently. 

The Asset obeys. He keeps his body frozen in place, but he can’t stop the retching noise when the tube hit the back of his throat and continues down. There’s more talking around him. A tech adjusts the little machine on the IV stand and his flesh and blood arm starts to burn in the most glorious way. He hates this. He knows they’re drugging him. Sedatives and muscle relaxers through his arm. A high caloric, nutrient dense slurry through the tube. They’re prepping him for the extreme freeze of cryogenic stasis. He knows can’t survive without it. 

The doctor is back to his ranting. “I’ve been working on this project since the fucking ‘90s and if there’s one thing that these ego maniacal politicians never seem to get is that this is a delicate piece of machinery.” He reaches out and tucks an oily stand of the Assets hair behind his ear. The touch is too tender for the Asset to comprehend and his schools his face into blank mask they expect from him. “What’d you do, jump in the fucking river? Hm?” The doctor is staring at his pupils with a pen light. He can’t answer with the tube down his throat. He knows this doctor though, he never expects replies. He talks to him frequently in the same manner people talk to a loved pet. But he’s never cut him open just to see how fast he can heal. He wasn’t on the Winter Soldier project when they were still testing the limits of Zola’s serum. 

“You smell like a fish market.” He makes a disgusted face and turns to one of the techs snapping his fingers. “Stevenson! Get this arm serviced. I want it ready for the tank in two hours.” Panic flashes through his chest. He can’t go in cyro yet. There was something… he can’t quite remember now. The drugs being funneled into his arm are making him slow. He knows he needs to give his mission report. Once they wipe him he won’t remember. He starts pulling on his IV only to get his hand immediately slapped away. 

“Hey. Stop that.” Rollins has been watching him close enough to see the panic flare in his eyes at the doctor’s words. He must recognize why because he tells him softly, the way you would to a child, “No mission report this time.” He doesn’t understand. The drugs are making him tired and sluggish. He has to report to his handler. Always. Then the wipe and stasis. That’s how it’s always been. And there was something else. He looks down, confused. He can’t go back in stasis yet. He has to find someone. Someone needs… he can’t remember. He’s so tired. 

He loses time again. The tech is finishing up on his arm. He’s been moved again. Someone washed his hair. Dressed him in the stasis suit. He’s running out of time. He licks his chapped lips. The tube is gone. He looks around the room making a quick threat assessment, running through scenarios in his head. It’s just the techs and the escort guards here. No one with command triggers. He could take the guards easily enough if he wasn’t doped to the gills on sedatives and muscle relaxers. Fuck. But he can still do it. Just one of those M16’s and he could do it. He could fight his way out. 

The doctor is back, his staff of technicians scurrying along behind him. He’s issuing orders right and left. They’re abandoning the base. Cleaning house. There’s documents to shred and incinerate. Equipment and materiel to pack up and ship to storage. Like him. 

“…Already got a transport scheduled for tonight,” the doctor is saying to Rollins. “We’ll get it back to the Motherland and get these kinks ironed out. Of course, like I said earlier, there’s nothing wrong in the programming. It just wasn’t made for long term missions like this. 72 hours, max. But that idiot Pierce just kept sending it back out. And against Captain Rogers of all people. That was just begging for trouble from the beginning. The programming can only do so much you know. There’ll always be a ghost in the machine. Honestly, it’s like he wanted this to happen.”

The Asset doesn’t know why he shouldn’t have been sent to eliminate Captain Rogers (level 6 target.) Was it because he had command triggers? Was he a former handler? Or was he supposed to replace Rumlow? Only handlers have the trigger phrases. He called him Bucky. He said he had a name. He said he was his friend. It doesn’t make sense. He needs more intel, and if they put him in the tank he’s never going to get it. He has to report to his handler.

The doctor is opening the stasis tube, making adjustments, getting ready to put him away in the ice… and the Asset makes a decision. He’s not going back into cryostasis to stashed away in some HYDRA base in the frozen Russian tundra for who know how long until the next head of HYDRA steps up. His programming demands he report to his handler after a mission, and if Rumlow and Pierce are both axed then there’s no one left to report to. It’s closest he’s ever come to being free of eternal cycle of freezing and thawing. Mission after mission, wipe after wipe. Even thinking about turning on HYDRA constricts his chest into a tight panic induced knot, but this looks like as good of an opportunity as he’s ever going to get. 

There are four unarmed technicians, the doctor, three escort guards armed with high power rifles and stun batons and Rollins, who is undoubtedly the most dangerous person in the room other than himself. He doesn’t want to have to kill Rollins, but he’s not going to go back into the stasis tank. He rolls his shoulders experimentally, assessing how healed he is from his fight with the Captain. Steve. His shoulder twinges with pain and his ribs ache from being crushed under the beam, his body feels like it’s been drug behind a car for a few miles of bad road, but he’s operational. Rollins catches his movement from where he’s watching him. Rollins with his sharpshooter’s eyes, he always sees more than he lets on. The Asset will have to make this quick. A hand to hand with Rollins will cost time and energy that doesn’t have. And the techs all carry tranquilizer syringes that would be easy to stick him with if he gets caught in fistfight in the small tank room. He takes a deep breath, letting the air inflate his lungs until his ribs burn where they were crushed just a few hours ago. But he needs more oxygen in his blood to fight the drip of the IV. He adjusts his breathing technique so that he keeps the most oxygen intake as possible without looking like he’s about to bolt. 

Rollins can see something has changed in his demeanor and his hand shifts casually to his sidearm. The Asset looks him full in the face and ticks the corner of his mouth up in a grim smile. Rollins has enough time to grab for his weapon and yell, “DON’T,” before the Asset is moving. Up out of the chair, IV ripped out and stabbed in the neck of the closet guard, a warm crimson flowing over his flesh hand. He’s pulling man’s arm up behind his back and spinning the stunned body around to block him from the rest of the room. He doesn’t even relieve the man of his rifle, just wrests the gun up as Rollins’s bullets slam into his human shield’s torso. A spray from the M16 takes out the two other guards, just now pulling their own weapons. Blood and thicker things sprays across the white floor, slicking it between him and the doctor who’s gone wide eyed and is reaching for his tranquilizer. A bullet from the rifle hits him in the gut and he goes down screaming along with the tech standing next to him, hit by the through and through. Rollins is blocking the single door with his body, yelling at him to stop. 

A tech has slipped behind him and thinks he’s going to sneak up and slip a needle into his back but the Asset drops the body of the first guard and catches the tech’s wrist in his metal hand, crushing the wrist with a sickening snap. The M16 goes down with the guard’s body but he shields behind the tech and rips open his neck in a spray of gore with his flesh hand. The tech spasms and as he drops to the floor and the Asset catches one of Rollins’s bullets in his right side as he lunges and rolls across the room, grabbing the gun of one of the other guards and he comes up, spraying a hail of gunfire at the two techs standing behind the writhing bodies of the guards. The room is a cacophony of screaming and blood. One tech is a headshot, and he drops like lead while the other catches shots in the chest and neck. his scream ending in a syrupy gurgle.

The Asset takes another of Rollins’s bullets. His left shoulder explodes in fire as the bullet bounces off bone and metal, but he’s facing Rollins on even ground now. No one left standing but the two of them. A standoff. Rollins has his pistol is aimed at the Asset’s head and the Asset’s rifle is sighted on Rollins chest from where he’s crouched on the floor. He hesitates for a full second staring at Rollins’s face before he pulls the trigger and turns his chest into so much meat. He dies with his eyes open in shock. 

The Asset slowly stands up, ripping the rifle away from one of the guards who wasn’t quick enough to get off a shot of his own. He goes around the room, painted red with blood and takes his choice of weapons from the dead and dying. A scalpel pilfered from the tray next to the surgical table finishes off the ones still crawling for an exit when he runs it across their throats. 

His hands are slick and sticky with blood. The wound in his side in flowing freely, through and through, gluing his stasis suit to his torso and running in rivulets down his leg. Every step leaves a fresh bloody footprint on the white industrial tiles. This is just about he sloppiest wetwork he’s ever done, he thinks woefully, then snorts at how ludicrous that is because it’s not like he would remember anyway. 

When the next wave of guards comes barreling down the corridor, he’s ready for them with three M16’s, Rollins’s pistol, extra clip and several scalpels tucked into a roll of his pants leg. Adrenaline is singing in his veins. He eliminates each target like knocking down dominoes. One bullet, one kill. Room by room he clears the base, leaving a bloody trail in his wake. The whole siege takes less than 10 minutes. By the time he’s done he’s the only breathing thing left in the building. 

He rolls his shoulders outside the dormitory feeling the bullet fragments from Rollins’s shot grating against the metal of his shoulder. his whole body feel slick with blood from his neck to his bare feet. He puffs out a deep breath and lets himself slump down against the wall of the dormitory. He’s just killed two techs hiding from the sound of gunfire in their bunks. He thinks it’s a little perverse how calm he feels surrounded by dozens of dead men and women. But he feels absolutely nothing. Empty. 

He takes a moment to plan his next course of action before getting up and heading back towards the medroom. He’s going rouge, which means running and passing for civilian. And the first thing civilians don’t do is walk around with bullet wounds. He pulls medical supplies while stepping over bodies and gore and treats his injuries to the best of his limited ability. His side is an in and out and he rinses it with saline before slapping a compression bandage across his side. The shoulder is trickier. The fragments of the bullet aren’t coming out without surgery and he’s not a surgeon. Digging around in the wound would just damage the shoulder further. He still has full use of the arm, it’s just painful. He can deal with pain. And the fragments might even work themselves out as the wound heals. He just cleans the wound and sticks a bandage over the seeping hole. It’s just going to have to be good enough. Before he leaves the base for the last time he packs a duffle with supplies. As he’s slipping out the back door he dials 911 from one of the burner phones he took from the supplies lockers and leaves it laying in the doorway on an open line.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up- Hospital surveillance. Special guest star Natasha Romanov. And 3/4 tons of angst.


End file.
